Today's Newspaper

Front Page: "So that's where she gets her height" -- R


Back Page: guess what's for lunch with a hot fudge sundae? Isn't this just beautiful?

Drawing Class

Today I took a drawing class. More like I cornered my artist friend CD to teach me how to draw. CD made me a fantastic hair portrait in charcoal a few years ago and it is still my favorite piece of work. She's since made a couple of hair portraits for other people and everybody's really happy. In other words, she is very very good. So why not learn from someone who's good at what they do.

She started with: draw your hand

Then, made me do several exercises including Blind Contour Drawing, Modified Blind Contour Drawing, and drawing my hand over and over again.

Usually, I can't draw a line properly, my handwriting is atrocious, and my idea of art in grade school was a crate of coke bottles that i dripped paint on. My art teacher said that wasn't art. Now, I KNOW that it was an installation and I was just WAY ahead of my time.

Anyway, the drawing class lasted two hours... as The Dawn had R shooting them in the gallery walking all around me....

My hand drawing before... is above.

My hand drawing after ....


Thank you CD! See you Wednesday. Anyone else want to join the class?

Lechon

I took this picture of a lechon freshly delivered in December at a niece's wedding reception. Just toying around with R's camera that I swiped for the drive out of Manila to Laguna where we all assembled for the big day. It was the wedding of my cousin's daughter, and I was the only cousin around. I think I was the only one invited--art ties apparently thicker than blood. Anyway, so I took this picture of the lechon in anticipation of getting to the skin first. Last month, I got a request from weekly international magazine T asking for lechon photos, so I sent a couple. I really only had a couple, unlike the trigger happy 8 GB memory-card-carrying folk out there. And they ended up choosing my one. May 4th edition talking about our lechon being "the best". So in a one degree of media separation, I am part of the long tail of Anthony Bourdain's lechon adventure.

The Name Game

Mrs. Marcos is very good with names, remembering the name to the face. I guess all politicians are. Martin Nievera's good with names too. I guess in showbiz you have to be. Or if you are in either industry and a big enough player, you have an aide following you around who is good with names, whispering them in your ear as you approach (think Anne Hathaway to Meryll Streep's Anna Wintour).

I am pretty good at names. I am neither in politics nor in entertainment. But pride myself in remembering almost everyone I've met, or at least being able to place the person. Till last night, I saw someone's sister/relative/cousin. Not sure which one she was of which friend, but we said our hellos and had a full on conversation. Then I proceeded to introduce her wrongly with matching wrong story of who she was and who she was the cousin of to R. Now this was a tight table of three people: R, her and myself. The funny part was she didn't bother correcting me and played along. Yikes. Sorry po. Dyahe. Now, seven hours later, I'm so bothered because I still can't figure out who she is!

Ruffa and Baz

Sunday thoughts:
1. Angels and Demons, the movie version: not even close to the excitement and suspense that the book by Dan Brown held. Don't bother watching it, and I almost feel like the whole "the Catholic Church didn't let us film" spin was not from the church, it was to get people to watch. As sister R says, "it was a shallow, soulless, cliff notes version". Which made sense why brother M loved it, as I think he went to cliff notes school.

2. Star Trek XII: I want to watch it. i think they had the most fabulous muted '70s fashion colors in the tv series.

3. Hayden Kho sex videos: who cares! Go Lorna Kap, lawyer to the Hayden. I saw HK and VB at the parlor one Saturday morning. They both looked like they had just rolled out of bed. VB was in hot panty shorts (who gets away with that???!, bravo for guts, silence for dimples), and HK was in puruntong basketball shorts. He looked very much the basketball player type (James Yap comes to mind). Didn't James Yap have the incidents in VB's clinic?

4. Watching Ruffa the other evening talking about her brother surviving a car accident because he wore a seatbelt, I believed her when she said "everyone should wear a seatbelt". Not that I didn't believe this unquestionable fact, it was that I believed her, Ruffa. She comes across as credible and steady when she's talking about serious things. Ruffa, time to try again for CNN. I think you'd make a good anchor. I saw Kristi Lu Stout in Hong Kong last week, kayang kaya mo siya.

5. Picture: Baz Luhrman in our booth in Hong Kong. He was our last visitor last week at the HK09 Art Fair. Thank you Alex Seno... happy weekend all...

Rains

The Raven (photograph by RR) is my favorite of Pepper Roxas' pieces in her show at 20Square. It feels like me. Dark and proper and proud and quiet.

The rains have arrived. Cousin LT (not Lorna Tolentino) came by the other day and showed us the projected sea level rise and storm surge simulations by the World Wildlife Fund for Humanity. He says that at the rates global warming ++ are going, we might see the new coastline of the Philippines twelve meters higher by the end of the decade. In a year and a half. In a nutshell:
1. Manila's new bay area will be Pasig and Mandaluyong
2. Boracay will be two tiny islands
3. Davao, and countless other cities, will lose their sea ports and airports to water

Which got me thinking, it is time to sell the properties I do not own. Bye Bye Dasma, Bye Bye Malate, Bye Bye Forbes.

Our ideal lot in our ideal location is being offered to us at a price 'hindi binebenta', in other words, it's above market price. Above our budget. Above anyone's budget. The broker has been on my case for three weeks, told her I would only buy if she sold something else for me. Voila, she found a buyer. Then I told her, "but the sea level rise and the storm surges will reduce the value of that to zero and it will all be underwater even before I hit 40". To which she said, "we will novena that it won't happen. God Bless."